


Not In His Nature

by mame_loshn



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: Character Study, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-08
Updated: 2016-12-08
Packaged: 2018-09-07 05:46:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8785462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mame_loshn/pseuds/mame_loshn
Summary: "We lose everything, but make harvestof the consequence it was to us. Memorybuilds this kingdom from the fragmentsand approximation. We are gleaners who fillthe barn for the winter that comes on."--from "Moreover," by Jack Gilbert





	

**Author's Note:**

> Light spoilers for A Year in the Life. 
> 
> This is more of a meditation on Jess as a character than anything particularly driven by plot, but it was rattling around in my head nevertheless.

It is only now, looking back, that Jess truly understands that, of the two of them, Luke is the better man. He imagines himself in Luke’s position fifteen years ago, perforating the membrane around his carefully ordered life to admit a strange, surly teenager, this hypothetical miscreant disrupting the sanctity of his quiet morning coffee and the stacks of half-read manuscripts that prop up his teetering record collection. The idea of a mostly grown kid thrust into this space, snarling and flailing and listening to something godawful at full volume, feels like the stuff of nightmares. No one stays in this apartment long, even the handful of women who’ve passed through his life over the years--easier to have this quiet nest above the press, sacrosanct from outside intrusion. He writes better this way.

 

Jess recalls unslinging his bag from his shoulders that first night in Stars Hollow, cold fury and indignation running taut wires through his muscles. How easy it was to dismiss Luke as simple, dull, provincial, in his small apartment above the diner where his father had once had an office. Luke moving along the well-trod trajectory of his day, never deviating far from his orbit. Tethered to that diner, a place which tested the limits of both the stress and the monotony of food service, into which Taylor or Kirk or a coffee-fiending Gilmore might irritatingly crash at any given moment. Jess pitied Luke once upon a time, certain that while his mother was a flake, her brother bore an even stronger resemblance to a clod of earth. 

 

Now he sees that Luke is a man for whom love is something largely unsaid: a thing that lives in your hands, in what you make of the day, in small steady signs of devotion. Jess glances around the apartment above Truncheon Books that he still inhabits (though Chris and Matthew have long since found their own places at his heartfelt urging), at the new paint and light fixtures and window sashes which Luke came down to help him install several years ago. The two of them worked for hours in a companionable silence after their usual verbal skirmish (and Jess had tossed Luke’s hat out the window for good measure, just so that his uncle didn’t think he was actually glad to see him). Love is something that lives in your hands, and Luke had measured, hammered, primed, and shouted at every uncooperative inanimate object in the room until Jess had had no choice but to drag him bodily from the building and buy him a salad and a beer just to shut him up. The memory curls his lip into an involuntary grin.

 

Despite this affection for Luke, he will always resent the hell out of Lorelai Gilmore. It galls him how a woman who fought so intensely not to be reduced to tropes and stereotypes, who with her brassy quickness demanded from everyone to be wholly seen, could still look at him with eyes narrowed by the ghost of mistrust. If it were in his nature, he would grab her hands and shout _I was a kid. A shitty, angry kid. My sadness lived in my mouth and twisted everything I spoke into a weapon, made my lips bleed on its way out. I’m sorry. Why can’t you forgive me?_

 

This, of course, is not in his nature.

 

Some days, he thinks it’s because she didn’t like the competition. How his wit could rival hers when he let it, the sparkle and bubble of her whimsy punctured by his acerbic barbs. He saw how she carried the weight of disappointed expectations, that manic cheer buoyed up at times only by the security of the small, bizarre world she’d built to hold her. He witnessed her dismay at how quickly Rory stepped out of their insular life to accept the mantle of scion and debutante. It was the same dismay that coursed through him the night he met that douchebag Logan, and watch Rory contort herself into various states of apology and excuse on his behalf. If it were in his nature, he would have grabbed her hands after his incredulous, indignant rant and whispered _you were a girl who always had a book in your hands and a question on your tongue, and now you are a woman cringing at the side of an entitled drunk, with no books, no questions. How did it come to this?_

 

This, of course, is not in his nature.

 

He does not ask the Gilmore girls to imagine what the world looks like to those of whom nothing was expected, under whom no net woven of Stars Hollow’s adoration and Chilton’s prestige and Richard and Emily Gilmore’s deep pockets was spread. Jess Mariano had stepped off a bus into Stars Hollow with a duffel bag and a book in his pocket, laden with the world’s total indifference to his existence. Nothing awaited him: not the pressure of breeding and wealth, certainly, and there was only Luke’s gruff refusal to let him drift keeping him from the deepest vicissitudes of boredom and mediocrity. That not everyone is an escapee from an Edith Wharton novel was one of those things that would not penetrate their remarkable Gilmore self-absorption, or their sincere (though unacknowledged) conviction that they hold a premium on suffering. 

 

He is not still in love with Rory. Or maybe he is. At least, it isn’t a fire that he actively stokes, but rather a bank of live coals kept warm under ash and memory. He hasn’t seen her often over the years, couldn’t say when the jagged edges of the history between them began to erode into something softer, almost friendly. He heard from Luke that she’d graduated from Yale, though he hoped rather than believed that his words to her had had much to do with it. He couldn’t totally suppress the small prickle of pain every time he saw her and she asked nothing about him, or showed minimal interest in the solid life he’d built for himself at the press. Ever since that night at the opening years ago, when she came all the way down to Philly only to tell him she was in love with that douchebag Logan, the painful clench of suppressed hope he feels when he sees her has been shot through with disappointment. He wonders if he has failed her. Whether he failed to repay the genuine recognition and rapport that she offered him as a lifeline during his teenage drowning years. Having loved Rory Gilmore is not only a hell of a high bar to have set for intellectual companionship, but saddled Jess with an inconvenient sense of a debt to repay to the genuine, earnest girl who told him that he was worth something and made him believe it.

 

Seeing her at thirty-two behind the desk at the Stars Hollow Gazette, tipping him a few fingers of bourbon, brings back this rush of emotional dissonance between exasperation and affection and nostalgia and bitterness--biting back _I’m just fine, Rory, thanks for asking_ as she bemoans her directionlessness (but it’s not in his nature, not anymore). Write about your life, he finds himself saying almost before he’s really certain of himself. Write a book and show it to me. And she smiles, grateful, always too ready to lean on him for a reminder that she’s worth something and for him to make her believe it.


End file.
